Traditional hearing aids operate by closing down certain sounds to allow you to focus only on what you need to hear, and while that does work well for most kinds of hearing loss it also creates an artificial listening experience. The brain is deprived of the context it needs to make sense of certain sounds, and the listener is in turn deprived of a dynamic sound experience.
Oticon's new Opn hearing aids aim to change that by delivering a more natural "open sound" approach for its users.
Oticon and the BrainHearing™ Approach
The secret to the Opn hearing aids is Oticon's BrainHearing™ Technology audiological approach, which is designed to support how the brain interprets sound. Instead of filtering out sounds that the listener does not want to hear and focusing on sounds like soft speech, an Opn hearing aid allows the user to follow multiple sound sources in noisy environments. The result is that the listener is more engaged with the world around them and can easily converse with multiple people.
The Opn™ are powered by Oticon's new Velox™ platform and feature Oticon's BrainHearing™ technology. Opn hearing aids operate by scanning the surrounding environment 100 times per second to analyze every sound individually and balance them so they can be heard clearly at all times. This even works in noisy crowds and places that have been known to give people with moderate to severe hearing loss a lot of trouble.
Less Listening Effort and Improved Speech Understanding
One of the biggest advantages of wearing an Opn hearing aid is that it requires much less effort for the wearer to hear in a noisy environment. Preliminary data from Oticon shows that any listening effort is reduced by 20 percent, which greatly reduces the load on the brain.
This also means that wearers increase their capacity to remember what they hear by 20 percent while increasing their understanding of speech by 30 percent. Since wearers no longer focus almost exclusively on one source of sound, they are almost immediately more aware of their surroundings.
Experience the Difference
Oticon Opn hearing aids aim to deliver a richer and more natural sound than traditional hearing aid solutions. Not only do these new hearing aids perform the usual task of improving your hearing, but it provides significant cognitive benefits by lessening the load that listening and focusing on sounds puts on the brain.
The Opn is available in the discreet and sleek mini receiver-in-the-ear style and a wide variety of colors. Contact your audiologist for a clinical hearing assessment to determine if the Opn™ is the hearing solution that's right for you.